Final Words

These two new offerings work well to push the top end and drop into the top of the mid-range market. The 6800 Ultra Extreme will probably be out of reach, price and availability wise, for most of us. But, for those hard core gamers out there, both the Platinum Edition and the Ultra Extreme look very good depending on what kind of games are going to be pushed most often through the framebuffer.

The 6800 GT leads the X800 Pro in value more often than not. Of course, the small price difference in the market might not be much now, but honestly the GT and Pro are very comparable parts. The decision is a hard one to make. Our graphs show it, and our recommendation for the moment reflects it: when performance is on par, go with the cheaper hardware. NV40 has the added bonus of Vertex and Pixel Shader 3.0 support (already shown to help make a difference in FarCry performance) and with floating point frame buffers (which could help provide some very cool blending and HDR effects if developers support it). When everything is said and done, the 6800 GT gets our recommendation despite the close performance.

The GeForce 6800, while not the most impressive performer that we've seen, certainly improves on the performance of the 5950 Ultra and 9800 XT with a much lower cost than both. Unless an application that requires 256MBs of video RAM is key in the decision-making process, the 6800 is a better choice right now than the former top-of-the-line cards, even at their reduced prices. This price point should get even more interesting when ATI's $300 offering hits the streets.

As new technology trickles down through the mid-range and budget markets, consumers who don't care about graphics will be armed with some relatively nice hardware. We are definitely looking forward to seeing what hits at the $200 price point.

For those in the market for a card now, we will continue to try and provide the best information possible. Soon, we'll be taking a hard look at individual vendors cards. We'll be looking at things such as cooling, noise, and overclockability.

The best advice that we can give right now is to pick your card based on the games that you enjoy the most. No matter what ends up happening, there won't be any reason to be disappointed when deciding between ATI and NVIDIA this time around. It really does come down to the value of a particular card with respect to the games that any particular person plays.

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46 Comments

Regarding the logarithmic scale, again, I don't think that it was a really bad idea. It tries to equalize scores that really have a lot of variables. What would be the best way of measuring bang-for-the-buck? Well, here's what I think would actually have to come into consideration.

Well, you would have to take into account the desired average frame rate. This of course varies from game to game, but a score of somewhere between 60 and 100 FPS would probably be ideal. Of course, this would vary between games, as a game like Unreal Tournament 2004 "needs" higher frame rates more than something like Flight Simulator 2004 (or whatever we're on now).

Why 100, when you can't really "see" things that fast? Well, ideally, you would want V-synch enabled for maximum image quality. 100 FPS without V-synch would probably get pretty close to your refresh rate, i.e. 85 Hz, with V-synch. Meanwhile, 60 FPS with an 85 Hz refresh rate might end up scoring more like 42.5 FPS with V-synch enabled. Even worse, 59 FPS with a 60 Hz refresh rate might score as low as 30 FPS.

Anyway, the scale would be weighted, so scores lower than this threshold would be punished increasingly more, while scores above this threshold give diminishing returns. In other words, if we're shooting for 60 FPS, a score of 55 is pretty close, so it gets maybe 89% on a relative scale (instead of the mathematical 91.7%), while a score of 50 might only get 75% (instead of 83.3%) and a score of 45 might get 55% (instead of 75%). Meanwhile, 70 FPS might score 110% (instead of 116.7%) and 80 might score 115% (instead of 133.3%). That's just a rough example to illustrate what I'm talking about - no actual formula was used there.

You might want to consider *minimum* frame rates (although the weight given to the average frame rate does accomplish *some* of this). So maybe we want a minimum frame rate of 40 FPS, and again its weighted so that dropping below this hurts more, while exceeding this value benefits less. And maybe there should be some factor taking into account the percentage of time that a card drops below this threshold?

Price is also a factor. Some people have limits, so you would have an inversely weighted price scale based off your target. Say you want to spend $200. Cards costing less than that would be more desirable, even with lower performance, while cards costing more would be less desirable.

You can go on with all sorts of ideas. In the end, though, it ends up being far too complex for anyone but a mathematics professor. So, the log scale rating that was used isn't terrible... it's just a little interesting, since a straight scale is more easily calculated, more people are familiar with it, and some would say it’s more “accurate” (although that last is more opinion than anything).Reply

our grphing engine doesn't display log scale. I went to all this trouble to get around that :-)

Also, we will get color coding in our graphing engine sometime soon, but we don't have it yet ...

Normalizing everything to avg fps and avg cost wouldn't be as useful if done on a per graph basis (which it would have to be done on)... Unless you picked an arbitrary normalization point like desireable fps across all games and desireable cost for that fps .... but that's too sticky and specific ... You have a good idea, but i don't think it would be straight forward to impliment --- we'll see what we can do with this though, thanks.Reply

Normalise all the results to the average fps/cost of all the cards. Any card close to the normal average(1 or 100 if x100) will be a reasonable to good buy and the outer extremes will be accentuated while still being contained (unlike logarithmic representation that distort the comparison).
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You might wonna improve the presentation of your results (at least in the Final Words page) by putting them in as few as possible tables (and add/or only use relative results (%) beside actual FPS (mandatory for the GPU which represents 100% or 1,00), to better relate the difference in perfomance -- now being represented by graph bars length which is not that accurate) instead of hundrets of graphs on tens of pages. It makes getting a good overview and doing quick comparisons very hard. You can also use some creative color coding (green = good, red = bad, etc.) to futher increase the readability of these tables. You have done a bit of this in some of your more recent reviews and I'd like see you do it even more and even step it up a notch or two.Reply

we would have had tiny values which look really bad on our graphs :-) So our first option was to scale the graphs up by multiplying by 100:

Value = 100 * fps / price

The problem with this is that the visual impact of the scaling seemed too dramatic. Now, we don't mean with the high priced ultrasuperextremegold cards. The problem was the difference between the X800 Pro and the 6800GT ... The GT certainly comes out on top, but we are talking about current market prices and a difference of $10. We didn't want to give this difference (the cost of a couple value meals at the local fast food place) more weight than people might ascribe it.

Of course, there are infinite other ways to look at this. Is frame rate *REALLY* important to you? Then its perfectly valid to look at this graph:

Value = fps^2 / price

or is cost the absolute driving factor to you?

Value = fps / price^2

Its all relative really, and very hard to determine. We just wanted to show which cards will give you more frames per dollar, but we didn't want to ascribe a dollar value to every frame ... So the log scale seemed to be our best bet.

But we are definitely open to feedback on how we approach value from a quantitative standpoint. Please let us know what you think, or if there is a better way to approach the issue.

Warcraft III is an interesting game. It is a DX8 game, but OpenGL rendering can be enabled with a commmandline switch. In doing some testing, we noticed that OGL mode gets MUCH higher frame rates on both cards (if you talk to some hard core wc3 freaks out there, they might already enable OGL mode to keep framerate up).

We spoke with Blizzard about the differences between the DX8 and OGL rendering paths. Specifically, we wanted to know if there was a quality difference that would make the OGL path run faster than the DX8 path. Blizzard informed us that the two paths had converged on the same quality level. They would not say that the DX8 and OGL paths rendered the exact /same/ image, but they maintained that the only reason they didn't was that DX8 and OGL can't rendere the exact same pixels in certain situations.

We may taclke some OGL benches in WC3 in the future if people are interested. But since we're trying to show realworld performance in these benches, and DX8 is what most people will use, we haven't felt like including these numbers would be useful for now.

Actually WCIII is DX8 based. Also, wc3 is quite odd with graphic cards. Even with a high end cpu, on toms hardware, the cards dont exactly scale evenly as they do in other benchmarks. Its like theres a cap placed on them in the engine or ATI's drivers dont have some sort of cap on them. I believe it is in the engine due to all cards seeming to have similar frames dispite the card used (unless AA or AF is turned on). The ati cards have a slightly lower cap it seems. I mean the difference is like 3fps between the 9700p and the 6800U. It makese no sense why they all stop here.Reply